A blog managed by the communications team at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Are you a member of the Jacobs School community? Have ideas for a blog post? Let us know! Email dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu or let us know via our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/UCSDJacobs
Tara Javidi, a professor of electrical and computer
engineering at UC San Diego, has received a $1M award from the National Science
Foundation’s Division of Computer and Network System as part of NSF’s new
Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS) program.
Javidi, who is a founding co-director of the Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and
Security (MICS) at UC San Diego, was awarded the grant to design a new
generation of wireless networks that are resilient to unforeseen disruptive
events, such as a weather event that can disable base station operations. The specific
aim of the project is to design intelligent and actively vigilant networks that
are in a constant state of preparedness, continually adapting their view of the
world by actively sensing the environment, learning from the past, and counterfactually
reasoning about the system’s future.
To bring intelligence and vigilance to these wireless
networks, Javidi’s team will work on providing a novel active resiliency
paradigm that senses both the internal system state and the external
environment to learn and reason about anomalies. The inclusion of sensing into
a future physical layer will be a cornerstone of realizing next generation
wireless networks such as 6G. Joint sensing and communication will enable high
performance allocation of limited resources and create the ability for the
network to reason about itself and its environment.
Project title: LARA: Layering for Active Resiliency and
Awareness in Next-generation in Wireless Networks
Rebecca Gow as an undergraduate rugby player. Now, she's using bioengineering tools to prevent injury in athletes.
UC San Diego bioengineering graduate student Rebecca Gow is
currently working on a project to study movement competency in athletes,
specifically female soccer players. Movement competency refers to how a certain
movement or physical task is performed, and how it can correlate to injury.
Gow, a student in bioengineering Professor Andrew McCulloch’s Cardiac Mechanics Research Laboratory, was particularly excited to contribute to this research
since she’s been an athlete her whole life.
“I played softball for about 12 years, all the way up
through high school, and then played rugby in college,” said Gow. “I was very
much interested in conducting research with athletes.”
After receiving Institutional Review Board approval, Gow and
researchers in McCulloch’s lab will work directly with athletes to study
movement competency using a novel screening approach. These movement screen
tests are crucial for training and injury prevention; however, most existing
screening tools are visual assessments, and can miss minor functional deficits
when observing movement competency and identifying asymmetries and postural
deficiencies in athletes.
“Movement quality is currently assessed visually so this can
be subjective and affected by how well trained the reviewer is,” said Gow.
Instead, Gow will use Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to
provide a less subjective, mathematical alternative to the existing visual
screen tests.IMUs are small devices
used to determine the orientation of, for example, a body segment. Athletes
will wear them while performing a set sequence of actions and the data will be
used to calculate joint angles. With a physics based analysis, this data will
help explain the link between movement patterns and incidence of injury.
Another benefit of using IMUs is that these movement tests
could then be done in a natural athletic setting, instead of having athletes
come into a lab for a traditional motional analysis screening.
Ultimately, this new way to study movement could explain how
different movement patterns lead to injury in the short and long term, helping
prevent injury for athletes, as well as people performing everyday tasks.
Gow met McCulloch at a bioengineering department social,
where she was also introduced to the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, which
this project is part of. The Alliance is a scientific collaboration among six
universities including UC San Diego, that aims to transform human health on a
global scale through the discovery and translation of the biological principles
underlying human performance. For Gow, that means playing a role in injury
prevention.
“I think that the Alliance is a great opportunity to make
connections and collaborate with researchers all over the United States to do
groundbreaking research,” said Gow. “It is an incredible group of people that I
can learn more from.”
Maybe you’ve joined the virtual hard hat tours. Maybe you’ve read about the new construction. Maybe you've even seen it for yourself along Voigt Drive. But the big news is that Franklin Antonio Hall is nearly open and you can help support it. Franklin Antonio Hall is nearly 200,000 square feet of research, education, and creation space that is helping make bold possible at the Jacobs School.
Alumni, corporations, and community members have truly stepped up to help make Franklin Antonio Hall a reality. We’ve raised over $59M toward our $60M goal for the new building. Thank you to all of our supporters.
You can help, with a gift of your own. You can make a tax deductible gift online HERE. If interested, naming opportunities begin at $25,000 and can be paid over a five-year period. If interested, please contact (518) 331-1120 or sburns@eng.ucsd.edu
NSF Brite Fellow Shaochen Chen of the University of California San Diego will create a nanoscale biomanufacturing platform powered by artificial intelligence that can serve as a functional, three-dimensional model of human tissues, organs and systems. This “human-on-a-chip” could transform regenerative medicine and tools for disease modeling, drug screening, environmental studies, space exploration, and other applications.
The National Science Foundation has awarded an engineering research grant to Shaochen Chen, professor and chair of nanoengineering at the University of California San Diego, to explore 3D printed microscale human organs-on-a-chip.
Funded through the NSF Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) program, the 5-year BRITE Fellow grants provide up to $1 million per project. The NSF BRITE program is funded by NSF Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) in the NSF Engineering Directorate.
"NSF created the BRITE Fellows opportunity to support proven researchers who have a high-risk vision with the potential for high reward for the Nation," said CMMI Division Director Robert Stone. "We anticipate that the research of the BRITE Fellows will create new fields, challenge current paradigms, or present unconventional approaches to intractable problems."
With funding from the NSF Brite program, Chen will create a nanoscale biomanufacturing platform powered by artificial intelligence that can serve as a functional, three-dimensional model of human tissues, organs and systems. This "human-on-a-chip" could transform regenerative medicine and tools for disease modeling, drug discovery and screening, environmental toxicity studies, and other applications.
By powering his 3D bioprinting platform with artificial intelligence, Chen aims to minimize the trial-and-error associated with the process that often leads to waste of cells and time. "This is a critical issue for bioprinting since live cells are quite expensive, difficult to acquire (think of patient cells, for example), and do not survive well outside the incubator," he said.
The ultimate goal of the project is to fabricate a human-on-a-chip in a microfluidic platform that integrates major human tissues including heart, liver, kidney, lung, and gut, and then study the chip's biomechanics and tissue functions.
A Jacobs School of Engineering graduate student and a recent PhD alumna were among the 50 scientific explorers named to The Explorers Club 50 list of people changing the world who the world needs to know about.
Founded in 1904 by a group of America's leading explorers, The Explorers Club is a multi-disciplinary professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration, and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore. The club's mission is to encourage and promote scientific exploration of land, sea, air and space, with an emphasis on the physical and biological sciences.
Vid Petrovic, computer science PhD student
UC San Diego computer science PhD student Vid Petrovic was named to the list for his work with the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative and the Drone Lab at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. His research interests span computer graphics, scientific visualization, machine learning and GIS, with a focus on the challenges of the accelerating collection and accumulation of site data in marine ecology, digital archaeology and cultural heritage. He is the principle developer of the Viscore platform, a software environment for integrating collected site data and performing virtual fieldwork,
"I work to help make virtual exploration of remote sites
practical and useful," said Petrovic. "Drawing on experience in digital
documentation of archeological sites in Jordan and
on digital augmented fieldwork in Florence, Italy,
which is part of a search for a lost DaVinci wall painting, I have been developing tools and techniques for
performing fieldwork digitally, especially on sites that
are difficult to access.
"An underwater cave
system such as the Sac Actun in the Yucatan is
inaccessible except to highly skilled divers. Remote
reefs such as the Palmyra Atoll do not require as
much diving skill, but still present logistical barriers
to a frequent, thorough study. In either case, opportunities for in-person exploration are constrained by the
realities of underwater work. To get around this, we
can use the limited time in the field to digitize the site
through systematic imaging and surveying so that it
can be explored virtually."
Jessica Sandoval, who earned her PhD in materials science and engineering in the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab at UC San Diego in 2021, is an avid ocean explorer, engineer and scientist. As a pilot of remotely operated vehicles (ROV), she works to advance technology in the fields of bioinspired robotics and deep-sea exploration by designing new adhesives and grippers for use in subsea manipulations.
"As an ROV pilot, engineer and scientist, I strive to push boundaries and ultimately to transform the face of exploration. Working in the heavily male-dominated field of ROV piloting, I became one of a small handful of lead female pilots. With the support of the Ocean Exploration Trust, I have grown as a leader at sea. I have taken on additional roles on the ship, including working as a 15-ton certified crane operator during deck operations for launch and recovery of the vehicles.
"Through my experiences, it became clear to me that representation and advocacy is crucial to broadening these fields to be more inclusive. I strive to encourage the participation of young women to join these fields. I frequently give guest lectures and presentations to young students and help to proctor workshops to encourage young women in STEM fields. I hope to lead by example and show that a Latina woman can push past barriers of representation and change the notion of what it means to be an explorer."
Mechanical and aerospace engineering students at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering presented their capstone senior design projects on March 16, showcasing projects ranging from a more comfortable soft robotic prosthetic, to a solar car vehicle suspension, a dermal cooling vest and more.
In the senior design course, teams of students apply their hands-on skills and knowledge of engineering theory to solve a real-world engineering challenge sponsored by a local company or research lab. They have 10 weeks to put all they’ve learned into practice, working within real world constraints like budgets and timelines.
The small orange and red radar reflector sitting on the buoy antenna makes the buoy far more visible to nearby ships.
This quarter, one team of students was challenged with creating a radar reflector for the Coastal Data Information Program(CDIP) at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. CDIP maintains a fleet of buoys in U.S. waters around the world equipped with various sensors and instruments to gather wave and climatology data. Occasionally, ships don’t see these buoys on their radar screens, and collide with them, causing damage and downtime for the data-gathering instruments. To make these buoys more visible and reduce collision, the students designed a spherical radar reflector to sit on the buoy’s antenna, which is visible from 5 times as far away as the existing long, cylindrical radar reflector being used. Their reflector means the CDIP buoys will show up on ship radar screens at a distance of 500 meters away, compared to the current 100 meters that existing reflectors reach. Currently, one of the student-designed radar reflectors is being used on a data-gathering buoy off the coast of Imperial Beach in San Diego, California.
A printed circuit board inside the black boxes contains a load cell and battery, allowing the force of each arm to be measured in real time.
Another team, sponsored by UC San Diego senior associate athletic director Matthew Kritz, was tasked with developing a tool for athletes and coaches to measure muscle disparities in different arms to prevent injury and develop training plans. The students designed a pull-up power meter that detects the force applied by each arm as someone does a pull up or other upper body exercise, and reads out that information in real-time on a web app. A small box containing a printed circuit board, load cell and battery can be attached to various types of suspension straps, and will wirelessly transmit the force applied by each arm independently, via Bluetooth, to the app. This data can help athletes correct any imbalances, thereby reducing injury and reaching their peak performance.
The Gemini Fellowship Program provides one pre-doctoral or post-doctoral researcher
working at the interface of engineering and health sciences with an award of $15,000
for one year of stipend support.
The Gemini Faculty Mentor Award is given to one early career faculty or research series
mentor a year, who has demonstrated a commitment to promoting diversity and
inclusion in research training at the interfaces of engineering and biomedical
sciences. The $15,000 award is meant to support the interdisciplinary research,
research training mentoring and outreach activities of these early career researchers.
The Gemstones Community Engagement Research Award supports community engagement research, mentoring
and outreach activities of faculty co-investigators teamed with undergraduate
or graduate students. Three awards of up to $10,000 each are given each year.
Applications for all three awards are now open. The deadline
for applications is May 1. More details and application instructions included
at the link for each award.
